“I understand that the government hasn’t flown against allied coalition planes until this mission,” said Rubeo.
Marcum shook his head. “An exaggeration. This is what I mean when I say there has been much misinformation about the entire intervention. I don’t blame anyone, not even the media. It’s a very difficult situation, and NATO command has been less than forthcoming with them. We have already identified half a dozen flights by the government in the past five days. This was the largest, and the only time they engaged a plane. My bet is they won’t be doing that again anytime soon.”
“Nonetheless, it is an interesting coincidence,” said Rubeo. “If it were significant, how so?”
Marcum frowned. Engineers didn’t believe in coincidences. But then again neither did Rubeo.
“The pilot would not be paying attention to the Sabres, not fully,” said Marcum. “He admits this.”
“Yes.”
“But the government would have to know about the attack in advance. A possibility not yet ruled out, but a far-fetched one.”
Rubeo wasn’t so sure. His attention drifted as Marcum continued, reviewing the preliminary data from the Sabres.
“All of the system profiles are absolutely within spec,” said Marcum. “There are no anomalies. Sabre Four believes it struck the coordinates it was told to strike.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No. Exactly.”
“The visual ID package should have checked off,” said Rubeo, referring to a section of the system that compared the preflight target data with information gathered by the aircraft before it fired. “It should have seen that it wasn’t hitting the proper target.”
“One of our problems. Or mysteries, I should say.”
Marcum went through a few slides, showing the designated target and then the village that had been hit. The devastation was fairly awful, as would be expected.
“Were the coordinates entered incorrectly?” asked Rubeo.
“If they were incorrect, how are they right now?”
“Hmmmph.”
“We are checking, of course, for viruses and the like. But at this point we have nothing firm.”
“Understood.”
Marcum turned to administrative matters, briefing Rubeo on the different team members he wanted and the procedures he would follow as he proceeded. NATO and the Air Force were conducting their own investigations; there was also to be a UN probe. Marcum had assigned liaisons to all, but expected little in the way of real cooperation. These were more like spies to tell him what the others were thinking.
Rubeo listened as attentively as he could, but his mind was racing miles away. He was thinking of what the attack would have looked like from the ground.
There would have been no warning until the first missile was nearly at the ground. A person nearby would hear a high whistle — Rubeo had heard it himself on the test range — and then what would seem like a rush of air.
Then nothing. If you were within the fatal range of the explosion, the warhead would kill you before the sound got to you.
That would be merciful. If you could consider any death merciful.
“Brad Keeler is on his way from the States,” said Marcum. Keeler had headed the team that developed the control software. “Once he’s here, we should be able to move quickly.”
“Good,” said Rubeo, still thinking of the missile strike. He saw the fires and the explosions. Bodies were pulled from the wreckage before his eyes.
Was I responsible for all that?
My inventions make war more precise, so that innocent people aren’t killed. But there is always some chance of error, however small that chance is.
Little consolation if you’re the victim.
“Something wrong?” asked Marcum.
Rubeo looked over at him. Marcum had turned off the projector.
“Just tired,” Rubeo told him. “Keep at it.”
11
Any aircraft would have felt a little strange to Turk after the Tigershark, but the A–10 was nearly as far removed from the F–40 as a warplane got.
The A–10A Thunderbolt had been something of a poor stepchild to the Air Force from the day of its conception. With straight wings and a cannon in its nose, the aircraft was the antithesis of the go-fast, push-button philosophy that ruled the U.S. Air Force in the late 1960s — and in fact, still largely ruled it today.
The Hog was born out of a need for a close-in, ground attack aircraft. While the country at the time was fighting in Vietnam, the perceived enemy was the Soviet Union, and the early design specs anticipated an aircraft that could be used to stop a massive tank invasion across the European plains. The plane was inspired partly by the success of the A–1 Skyraider — a highly effective throwback used to great effect in Vietnam, despite its alleged obsolescence. The “Spad,” as the A–1 was often nicknamed, was powered by a piston engine. Its primary asset — beyond the tough resourcefulness and skill of its pilots — was its ability to carry a large variety of ordnance under its wings. Clean, the Spad was comparatively fast for a piston-powered plane, but it was slow compared to jets. As a ground support aircraft, however, the lack of speed was something of an asset. In the days before complicated sensors and constantly updating satellite imagery, ground support relied heavily on the so-called Mk–1 Eyeball. Human pilots flying low and slow had a much better chance of putting the era’s unguided ordnance on target than fast-movers rocketing over the terrain.
The A-X project produced two aircraft sharing the same philosophy, both designed essentially around an armor-pounding, 30mm Gatling. The A–10 by Republic eventually won out. (The loser, the YA–9 built by Northrop, became the answer to a trivia question rarely asked of anyone, including plane buffs.)
The A–10 was designed and built in an era of tight budgets, and some say that the penny pinching hurt the plane from the very beginning. It was strictly a daytime, good-weather aircraft, with effectively no ability to fight at night: a critical oversight given the evolution of war-fighting doctrine in the years that followed, not to mention the fact that war generally takes place in all sorts of weather. And many critics pointed out that its engines were somewhat underpowered from the beginning. This was important not so much because it lowered the aircraft’s speed — speed wasn’t a real factor for the A–10A — but because the power of the engines limited the weight it could carry into the sky and the endurance of the aircraft.
A series of improvements in the last decade addressed the first set of drawbacks, adding enough modern sensors to the A–10A airframe that the planes had been redesignated the A–1 °C by the Air Force. While the plane remained essentially the same from the outside, inside the pilot’s “office” there were new displays and a data link that gave the Hog driver access to real-time combat information. The updated Hogs could also carry more modern “smart” weapons, including JDAM, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions.
Ginella’s eight planes were a further evolution. The upgraded avionics systems were tied to smart helmets, which functioned similarly to Turk’s — the pilots could use those helmets rather than the glass cockpit. There were certain subtle improvements — there was now a full-blown autopilot, separate from the remote link — and more obvious ones: uprated power plants that allowed the planes to carry even heavier bomb loads. The Hogs were still subsonic, but they had noticeably more giddy-up when accelerating. According to the stats, they had approximately forty percent more power, but used about a third less fuel under normal conditions.
The stats reminded Turk of EPA estimates on cars — always to be taken with a grain of salt — but there was no denying that the A–10E was a more powerful beast than its cousins.